Shakir is very wrong about one thing. If you are a rich Democrat living in your own policy bubble, you are not a good person trying to do good things. If you want to do good things you have to go out and talk to the average person, to the poorest 10% of the population, to marginalized minorities. You might pretend that you’re a good person, but it’s not true and secretly you know it.
I think you’re just wrong about what Harris was saying. I watched many of her speeches and read many newspaper articles quoting her, and there’s just no way that she was pushing a pro worker platform. It wasn’t in her blood, there was never any sign that she would do so.
I just want to bring up one issue that I think is a classic. The price of housing has gone up, and her solution was going to be to raise the first time homeowners tax credit. Now you might say to yourself, hey, that’s great. But the reality is bringing it up by tens of thousands of dollars was not going to make property affordable to the average person. A few people who are on the threshold, sure, but most people would still be screwed. But even for people who were near the threshold, we all know what was going to happen. Houses were going to get more expensive because more money was thrown into the mix. To think that you can fix massive corporate greed by having a small tax cut is just laughable.
If you actually want to solve the problem with expensive houses you need to ban real estate speculation or you need to create massive public housing programs. I think this is common sense to millions of americans. Of course millions of other Americans disagree, and I think Harris would disagree, too.
And there are a few positive examples of things that the Biden administration tried to do, but many of them were too little too late, and others were stopped by the courts and then the president just shrugged his shoulders. So it’s not just Harris’s policies in her speeches that matter. She was the vice president of a president who was generally a failure. And you could argue that it’s not his fault, that obstructionist people in Congress and the courts blocked him, but then you just admitting how bad his PR campaign was. And his success and failure went hand in hand with hers.
I don’t believe that for a second. They had so many people that they could have prosecuted quickly and they didn’t want to. They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew the risks of delaying attempts to find justice.
But if they actually feel demoralized now, this is something that they caused, and they should apologize to the general public for f****** it all up.
Well yeah. She wasn’t trying to make the average worker’s life better, and it’s no surprise that the DNC refuses to admit their own failures. Apparently it wasn’t enough to lose in 2016 and 2024. Why not try it again in 2028 and blame all the Bernie fans then, too?
It’s all an interesting thing and we need to keep in mind that people who support Trump in the courts and in the house and senate, they don’t do it because they like the man. They’re doing it to wield power. But as they give away power to Trump, as they take it away from themselves and give it to Donald Trump, they become less relevant.
So anytime we hear about a plan like this that sounds like it would be simple, the reality is that it’s far from simple. If you’re not a necessary cog in the chain, no one’s going to bribe you. And you’re there so that they have to bribe you.
Well yeah. What motive is there for the Israeli government to stop the violence? Very little, obviously.
Oh the irony of the times pointing out drawbacks to his policies now, when they had the entire previous year to do so. Sadly, even now they are still dishonest. Trump is going to threaten tariffs and impose them on some companies, and then get rid of them for his friends and political allies. Everyone knows this, if they’re paying any attention.
It’s not about election denialism. This is the standard problem with conspiracy theories being based on reality. Voter suppression has happened in small numbers and small ways for the last century. Pick your poison. Are we talking about felons being disenfranchised? Are we talking about taking native Americans off their roles because they don’t have home addresses and they use po boxes? Are we talking about rejecting college kids because they’re out of state? Are we talking about mailboxes being set on fire? Are we talking about polling places that are not handicapped accessible and never will be?
All of those things continue to happen and each of them plays a small part. I don’t think that would make a break the election, not this time when the difference was so large, but it could make a break some elections.
And as long as it’s left unaddressed, voters aren’t blind, they can see the shady shit. So then what, then you just don’t know how bad the problem is, and the same people that you would trust to compile data on how bad it is are the same people whose job it is to fix it, but they haven’t, so you can’t believe anything they say.
All of which is to say, if people are skeptical that the game is fair, that’s based on proven reality from decades of experience. But that doesn’t mean it affected this election.
Well written. It’s so important to keep in mind the basic incompetence of Donald Trump. Things will get very chaotic very quickly and stay that way.